Marcel Smets, PhD

Marcel Smets, PhD

Biography: Marcel Smets, a retired teacher of Greek and Latin with a special interest in Latin poetry, received his PhD from the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven. He is founder of Wolken en Water (Clouds and Water), a mini-journal on haiku and Eastern culture. He has also published widely in haiku journals. Smets is coauthor with Dirk Sacre of Tonight They All Dance: 92 Latin and English Haiku (Bolchazy-Carducci Publishers, 1999).

Elegant simplicity: Haiku in Latin, with English translation. Tonight They All Dance can serve as a primer to the composition of Latin verse and, as such, can lend students and scholars alike insight into the intricacies and joys of writing poetry in a non-native language. Haiku, with its short form and engaging content, is the ideal instrument for a first exploration of Latin poetic composition. By modeling the composition of Latin haiku and translating both the substance and the form into English haiku, students will begin to understand the challenges of accurate and beautiful translation. It is only through such intimate experience that a true sense of Latin verse can be gained.